Judge to Citizenry: Shut up already. Cato to Gov. Teddy: You stink!
While I am waiting for this data to finish appending itself to an SQL table, and because it is my birthday, I have decided to make you endure a longish blog post. The two subjects are quite nearly unrelated, but both drive me mad. I do not like being mad on my birthday, I’d rather be drunk, but I guess this will have to do.
“We, meaning Congress, Hate Liberty”
The Blogfather has posted a link to this fascinating interview with a member of the FEC.
Under the auspicies of the deviant affront to liberty that is McCain-Feingold, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has ruled that communication over the internet that is related to campaigns must be regulated by the FEC. That’s right folks, unless they decide to give bloggers press exemption the political speech of individual US citizens will be subject to regulation and fine by an arm of the US Government. Whatever happened to “Congress shall make no law…”?
Despite supporters’ protestations to the contrary, McCain-Feingold was never about getting the money out of politics. The law is about one thing, and one thing only: protecting incumbent members of government from competition from the dullards that compose the American body politic. Between McCain-Feingold and the odiousness of gerrymandering in the House of Representatives, which isn’t new by the way, Congress has removed itself almost completely from accountability to those from whom its power is derived. Then, of course, we have Senators arguing that the internet must be regulated:
Senators McCain and Feingold have argued that we have to regulate the Internet, that we have to regulate e-mail. They sued us in court over this and they won.
Persons with the attitude that speech over the internet must certainly be regulated have no place in American government. It’s a sad day when both sides of the aisle are more concerned about protecting their jobs than performing those jobs correctly. It has, apparently, been a sad day for a very long time.
Uncle Teddy: [Via The Mises Blog
The CATO Institute’s report card on state governors is out. Oregon’s Governor Ted Kulongoski scores a 58 and earnes a grade of D. Only 20 governors scored worse than Teddy. I am not surprised by this, and Bret will likely still be angry at me for throwing my vote away on Tom Cox during the last cycle, but I doubt Mannix would’ve been any better.
Oregon’s budgetary structure is designed specifically with heavy taxation in mind. It’s been argued by smart folks that Oregon is not a high-tax state, and that may be nominally true, but the heavy reliance on the personal income tax for state revenue begs to be abused. The cyclical nature of income tax receipts leads the state to a boom-bust spending cycle and major budgetary shortfalls when incomes cycle downward. Of course, when revenues are up the massive givaways that are so ingrained in the Oregon way of life and spending on other public projects skyrockets. When revenues fall, and they always do, those programs are nigh-on impossible to cut and lead to proposals for “temporary” tax increases or surcharges like we’ve seen in the last few cycles. This is an argument I’ve made before.
In short I think Kulongoski’s very poor grade is endemic* of a wider problem in Oregon politics that is unlikely to be solved simply by changing the governor. Oregon needs to shift away from the personal income tax as a primary source of revenue, it needs to eliminate state programs that are completely redundant, and it needs to get rid of the tax-kicker program to institute a rainy-day fund. Is any of this likely to happen? You decide, but it’s been said that native Oregonians are born screaming: “NO SALES TAX, NO SELF-SERVE GAS!”, so I wouldn’t suggest getting one’s hopes up.
*fixed for Dan, now it won’t go having any little baby spelling errors. My job, while making me smarter at banking, is turning me into a real dunce at writing.
